When the organisers of “The Match” at Bangkok’s Rajamangala Stadium started handing out runners-up medals, it provided the evening’s first real moment of jeopardy.
Jurgen Klopp had fielded 32 players, changing his entire outfield team after 30 and 60 minutes and switching goalkeepers at halftime. After Liverpool’s 4-0 defeat to Manchester United, you had to worry whether or not they’d minted enough consolation prizes to go around.
The pre-match focus was understandably on Klopp’s counterpart Erik ten Hag, who took charge of United for the first time.
There was plenty to like for the Dutchman, whose first job was to avoid the sort of humiliation that has followed United around like a putrid smell for much of the past year. An inexperienced Liverpool starting XI forced three early saves from David de Gea before Jadon Sancho opened the scoring and Fred and Anthony Martial netted either side of Klopp’s first round of multi-subs.
Youngster Facundo Pellistri crowned a scything counterattack 14 minutes from time, but Ten Hag was not about to get carried away after a game in which Liverpool, who finished with record signing Darwin Nunez and their other big-hitters on the pitch, hit the post three times.
“Believe me I have seen a lot of mistakes. It will take a lot of time. We have not overestimated this result,” the former Ajax boss said afterwards.
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It is the mistakes of those who came before Ten Hag in the Old Trafford dugout and boardroom that will apply training weights to the early months of this exercise, more so than any misplaced pass or botched clearance.
Whether or not Cristiano Ronaldo counts among those mistakes is a matter of polarised conjecture, but United did just fine without the veteran striker — officially absent due to “family reasons” amid speculation he wants to leave for Champions League football — as they attacked with clinical precision.
Fred’s chipped finish to make it 2-0 was delightful and split the goals from Sancho and Martial who, along with Marcus Rashford, provided pace and intensity up front.
Behind that trio, Bruno Fernandes certainly seemed to enjoy himself — not something you could claim with any conviction for most of last season.
Suggestions that Fernandes and Ronaldo can’t play together are somewhat overblown, as evidenced by their years spent together in Portugal's national team, but it’s indisputable that the playmaker’s form went fairly sharply south once his compatriot arrived in August 2021.
For all the expensive transfer market misses of the post-Alex Ferguson era at United, Fernandes was unquestionably a massive hit. Upon joining from Sporting CP in January 2020, he suggested a team under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer running on good vibes and nostalgia could become something more substantial.
Fernandes supplied goals and assists by the bucketload. There were eight and seven respectively in 14 appearances after arriving midway through 2019/20. When United finished as runners-up to Manchester City the season after, he scored 18 times and laid on 12 more in 37 outings.
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Ronaldo, along with Sancho and Raphael Varane, was supposed to be one of the final pieces in the puzzle that Fernandes had done so much to shape. But their campaign unravelled, Solskjaer was sacked, and the Ralf Rangnick experiment failed.
Part of the reason for that was the veteran German tactician never really coming up with a solid plan for how to best use Fernandes within variants of Rangnick's favoured 4-2-2-2. The player's 10 goals and six assists were a decent enough return under the circumstances.
Playing in front of the much-maligned midfield base of Fred and Scott McTominay in Bangkok, Fernandes revelled in the freedom he had as a No. 10. More pertinently, he enjoyed the added room in which he was allowed to operate.
Part of that was down to the failing midfield press of an experimental Liverpool side. The fact Klopp’s men returned to pre-season training a week later than United was abundantly clear.
The calmest man in the house.
— Manchester United (@ManUtd) July 12, 2022
That's our @Sanchoooo10! 🥶🤙#MUFC || #MUTOUR22
But whenever Fernandes popped up in pockets of space inside the final third, he had Sancho, Rashford and Martial pulling defenders around and making runs for him to pick out.
It was certainly a different experience to having the more static focal point of Ronaldo, who is frequently drawn deep to try and link play. Fernandes enjoyed having a broader canvas to paint upon and was involved in all of United’s first-half goals.
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Teenage Liverpool right-back Issac Mabaya failed to deal with Fernandes's chipped cross from the right-hand corner of the box and left the ball on a plate for Sancho. Fernandes drove towards the Liverpool area before the half-hour, where his pass caused a reasonable amount of havoc from which Fred capitalised.
A new-look Liverpool lineup was soon undone when Fernandes pressed Kostas Tsimikas into an ill-advised pass back to center back Rhys Williams, who was dispossessed by Martial to score.
As Ten Hag rightly cautioned, this is no time to draw any conclusions. But Tuesday’s version of Fernandes looked a lot more like the player United had before Ronaldo returned. With or without the great five-time Ballon d’Or winner, they need to see a lot more of that Fernandes if this latest Manchester United reboot is to be successful.
